How do we tell if a pattern of ecological disasters is new or old?
Mohamad Junaid, associate professor of sociology, anthropology and social work at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, looks through history to explore this.
I am an anthropologist with a strong belief in teaching as crucial to creating a just, sustainable, and pluralistic world. I seek to inspire students to build a critical understanding of socio-political questions in local and global contexts and to appreciate the interconnectedness of human and non-human worlds. I provide students with intellectual tools to nurture open-mindedness and to develop new modes of thinking. In my classes, I use a combination of social theory, ethnographic texts, and documentary films to illuminate anthropological approaches to cultural difference and questions of inequality and power, as well as to the discipline’s creative and imaginative potential.
Ecological Disaster and Cultural Imagination
In 2014, I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork among young Kashmiri activists. In early September that year, rain began but didn’t stop for days. On the fourth day of rain, the embankments of the River Jhelum collapsed, and a flood of water entered Srinagar city, reaching nearly 20 feet in height. As people hurried to save what they could, no one could find words to describe what they had witnessed. It wasn’t a typical flood—the sehlaab—that occurs every few years, causing some damage and leaving silt behind. The 2014 flood was a new kind of event, and I sensed that a cultural ineffability surrounded it. The destruction was astonishing. No one had ever imagined that such a tremendous amount of water could rush down so quickly.
I began examining old flood maps and early 20th-century reports in archives to see if other similar events had happened in Kashmir. However, the 2014 flood stood out as a truly exceptional event. Over the decades, the city had expanded, and the state’s flood control measures had helped contain water within the river’s banks. The breach of these banks and the sheer volume of water shattered the illusion of control, seeming to make the state vanish momentarily.
While continuing my initial research, I developed a strong interest in questions related to ecological disaster and cultural imagination. I wanted to understand whether something genuinely new was happening or if modern cultural imagination had lulled people into believing that nature had no agency over human worlds. I contend that something new is indeed unfolding—we see it more often than ever in images and reports. Yet, control-centered tropes of modernity foster social and cultural imaginaries that struggle to comprehend these new phenomena.
